Group Eight
alike The Transcendentalists can be understood in one sense by their context -- by what they were rebelling against, what they saw as the current situation and therefore as what they were trying to be different from. One way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them as a generation of well educated people who lived in the decades before the American Civil War and the national division that it both reflected and helped to create. These people, mostly New Englanders, mostly around Boston, were attempting to create a uniquely American body of literature. It was already decades since the Americans had won independence from England. Now, these people believed, it was time for literary independence. And so they deliberately went about creating literature, essays, novels, philosophy, poetry, and other writing that were clearly different from anything from England, France, Germany, or any other European nation. Another way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them as a generation of people struggling to define spirituality and religionItalic text (our words, not necessarily theirs) in a way that took into account the new understandings their age made available. The new Biblical Criticism in Germany and elsewhere had been looking at the Christian and Jewish scriptures through the eyes of literary analysis and had raised questions for some about the old assumptions of religion. The Enlightenment had come to new rational conclusions about the natural world, mostly based on experimentation and logical thinking. The pendulum was swinging, and a more Romantic way of thinking -- less rational, more intuitive, more in touch with the senses -- was coming into vogue. Those new rational conclusions had raised important questions, but were no longer enough. German philosopher Kant raised both questions and insights into the religious and philosophical thinking about reason and religion. This new generation looked at the previous generation's rebellions of the early 19th century Unitarians and Universalists against traditional Trinitarianism and against Calvinist predestinationarianism. This new generation decided that the revolutions had not gone far enough, and had stayed too much in the rational mode. "Corpse-cold" Emerson called the previous generation of rational religion. The spiritual hunger of the age that also gave rise to a new evangelical Christianity gave rise, in the educated centers in New England and around Boston, to an intuitive, experiential, passionate, more-than-just-rational perspective. God gave humankind the gift of intuition, the gift of insight, the gift of inspiration. Why waste such a gift? Added to all this, the scriptures of non-Western cultures were discovered in the West, translated, and published so that they were more widely available. The Harvard-educated Emerson and others began to read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, and examine their own religious assumptions against these scriptures. In their perspective, a loving God would not have led so much of humanity astray; there must be truth in these scriptures, too. Truth, if it agreed with an individual's intuition of truth, must be indeed truth. And so Transcendentalism was born. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men." Most of the Transcendentalists became involved as well in social reform movements, especially anti-slavery and women's rights. (Abolitionism was the word used for the more radical branch of anti-slavery reformism; feminism was a word that was invented deliberately in France some decades later and was not, to my knowledge, found in the time of the Transcendentalists.) Why social reform, and why these issues in particular? The Transcendentalists, despite some remaining Euro-chauvinism in thinking that people with British and German backgrounds were more suited for freedom than others , also believed that at the level of the human soul, all people had access to divine inspiration and sought and loved freedom and knowledge and truth. Thus, those institutions of society which fostered vast differences in the ability to be educated, to be self-directed, were institutions to be reformed. Women and African-descended slaves were human beings who deserved more ability to become educated, to fulfill their human potential (in a twentieth-century phrase), to be fully human. The major figures in this movement were: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Margaret Fuller, and Amos Bronson Alcott . Other prominent transcendentalists included Cyrus Bartol, Charles Timothy Brooks, Orestes Brownson, William Ellery Channing, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, John Sullivan Dwight, Convers Francis, William Henry Furness, Frederic Henry Hedge, Sylvester Judd, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, George Ripley, and Jones Very. Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882 Waldo Emerson is truly the center of the American transcendental movement, setting out most of its ideas and values in a little book, Nature, published in 1836, that represented at least ten years of intense study in philosophy, religion, and literature, and in his First Series of essays. Born in 1803 to a conservative Unitarian minister, from a long line of ministers, and a quietly devout mother, Waldo--who dropped the "Ralph" in college--was a middle son of whom relatively little was expected. His father died when he was eight, the first of many premature deaths which would shape his life--all three brothers, his first wife at 20, and his older son at 5. Perhaps the most powerful personal influence on him for years was his intellectual, eccentric, and death-obsessed Puritanical aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. Yet Emerson often confessed to an innate optimism, even occasional "silliness." His undergraduate career at Harvard was not illustrious, and his studies at the Harvard Divinity School were truncated by vision problems, but he was ordained a minister of the Second Church in Boston, shortly before marrying Ellen Tucker in 1829. He resigned in 1832 after her death from tuberculosis, troubled by theological doctrines such as the Lord's Supper, and traveled extensively in Europe, returning to begin a career of lecturing. In 1835 he married Lydia Jackson; they lived in Concord and had four children while he settled into his life of conversations, reading and writing, and lecturing, which furnished a comfortable income. The Emerson house was a busy one, with friends like Elizabeth Hoar, Margaret Fuller, and Henry Thoreau, staying for months to help out and talk. He, Bronson Alcott, and George Ripley decided to begin a magazine, The Dial, with Margaret Fuller editing, in 1840; Emerson would edited the final two years, ending in 1844. His Essays (first series) were published in 1841. Meanwhile, tragedy struck with the sudden death of his five-year old son Waldo in 1842, soon after the death of John Thoreau from lockjaw, and a darker, tougher strain appears in Emerson's writing, beginning with his memorializing poem, "Threnody." But Emerson pulled himself together to give a series of lectures in New York and in 1844 he had a new volume of essays prepared. He began planning a series of lectures on great men and publication of his poems in 1846, while speaking out against the annexation of Texas and reading deeply in texts of Persian and Indic wisdom. In 1845 he began extensive lecturing on "the uses of great men," a series that culminated with the 1850 publication of Representative Men; by that year he was giving as many as 80 lectures a year. Through a career of 40 years, he gave about 1500 public lectures, traveling as far as California and Canada but generally staying in Massachusetts. His audiences were captivated by his speaking style, even if they didn't always follow the subtleties of his arguments. In 1847 Emerson travelled to England, noticing in particular the industrialization and the chasm between upper and lower classes. When he returned to Concord nine months later, he had a new approach to English culture, which he expressed in his lectures on the "Natural History of Intellect" and his 1856 book, English Traits. In 1851 he began a series of lecture which would become The Conduct of Life, published in 1860. He was vigorous in middle age, traveling frequently, but was increasingly aware of his limits and failing energy. He had become quite famous, a major figure in the American literary landscape, a celebrity which brought both adultation and satire. He had been a profound inspiration for many writers, especially Henry Thoreau and Walt Whitman. He continued his speeches against slavery, but never with the fire of Theodore Parker. In 1857 he wrote an essay on "Memory" but ironically, in his later years, his own memory would falter, especially after his beloved house burned in 1872. He died quietly of pneumonia in 1882. Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862). Writer, philosopher, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. Associated with the Concord-based literary movement called New England Transcendentalism, he embraced the Transcendentalist belief in the universality of creation and the primacy of personal insight and experience. Thoreau's advocacy of simple, principled living remains compelling, while his writings on the relationship between people and the environment helped define the nature essay. Like his peers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thoreau believed nature to be an expression of God and a symbolic reflection of the transcendent spiritual world that works beyond the physical realm. After graduating from Harvard in 1837, Thoreau held a series of odd jobs. Encouraged by Concord neighbor and friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, he started publishing essays, poems, and reviews in the transcendentalist magazine The Dial. His essay "Natural History of Massachusetts" (1842) revealed his talent for writing about nature. From 1845 to 1847, Thoreau lived in a cabin on the edge of Walden Pond, a small glacial lake near Concord. Guided by the maxim "Simplify, simplify," he strictly limited his expenditures, his possessions, and his contact with others. His goal, as he himself puts it, was "To live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach." Thoreau was not a systematic philosopher but advanced his thought by embedding his ideas in the context of descriptive narrative prose. He is best known for Walden and Civil Disobedience, but wrote many other articles and essays. He was a lifelong abolitionist and delivered lectures attacking the Fugitive Slave Act, praising the writings of Wendell Phillips, and defending the abolitionist John Brown following Brown's assault on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Thoreau's Civil Disobedience influenced later nonviolent reformers, particularly Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. His philosophy can be represented by two epochal events: His two years of "experimental" life in nature at Walden Pond and a night in jail for refusing to pay his taxes. The former yielded his literary masterpiece Walden, showcasing his unique perspective on nature, man, perception, and culture; the latter gave birth to Civil Disobedience, his work on political philosophy. Because of its influence on later political leaders and civil activists, he was better known for his Civil Disobedience. Thoreau, however, developed his own unique philosophical perspective during his life at Walden. In addition to literature of the classics and Romanticism, Thoreau was familiar with a wide range of philosophical works ranging from Greek and Roman antiquity including Presocratics, Plato, Platonism, to the Modern philosophies of Descartes, Lock, Kant, and Cambridge Platonism, to mysticism and contemporaries such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. His interests, however, went far beyond the intellectual traditions of the West. He was one of the few philosophers who recognized the rich wisdom of ancient Indian and Chinese thought. Unlike typical philosophers of the Western tradition, Thoreau did not present his thought in a clear conceptual form. He did not present his thought by developing arguments against the existing philosophical traditions. Instead, he rather developed his thought through direct encounters with nature, and embedded his insights within literary prose. His theory of knowledge, perspective of nature and human life, the meaning of work, and the relationship between culture and nature echo issues that were later critiqued by phenomenology, pragmatism, and environmental philosophy in the twentieth century. From a contemporary perspective, his philosophy can be seen as a challenge to modernity and its presuppositions, including the myth of progress; domination of mass consumption cultures; and alienation of life from nature, which was for him the immanent place of deity. His experiences with nature were at the same time spiritual experiences. Thoreau's life can be seen as a direct critique of consumerism and the alienation from nature characteristic of modernity, while his writings anticipate issues later critiqued by phenomenology, pragmatism, and environmental thought in the second half of the twentieth century. It is, however, inappropriate to classify him into any category of traditional schools of thought. There are even reservations about classifying him as a transcendentalist. He did not hold common views, such as Christianity and a modern dualistic framework of thought, with other transcendentalists. Although Thoreau acknowledged himself as a member of this group, his thought was unique. Among his best known works are: *''A Walk to Wachusett'' (1842) *''A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers'' (1849) *''On the Duty of Civil Disobedience'' (1849) *''Slavery in Massachusetts'' (1854) *''Walden'' (1854) *''A Plea for Captain John Brown'' (1860) *''Excursions'' (1863) *''Life Without Principle'' *''The Maine Woods'' (1864) *''Cape Cod'' (1865) *''Early Spring in Massachusetts'' (1881) *''Summer'' (1884) *''Winter'' (1888) *''Autumn'' (1892) *''Miscellanies'' (1894) *''Journal of Henry David Thoreau'' (1906) Group Members: Sima Jafari, Sepideh Pourakbar